David Irving's famous
biography:

Göring

Instructions:
download the file, and read or print it with Acrobat
Reader -- get both free from the menu below. Note:
some servers will not permit large downloads. We
are indebted to Linda Nelson of Illinois for preparing
the Internet edition of this work. There is also a
compressed (.zip) file of the illustrations from the
book: download
| and the
original German language
edition and its
photos
(9 MB)

INEVITABLY in writing the Hitler biography I
assembled a large volume of materials about
Hermann Göring. Later, I collected
papers on his
part in the Beerhall Putsch of 1923. I also
spent years interviewing his deputy and
Staatssekretär Erhard Milch, a field
marshal, for a biography;
Milch had provided me with his diaries and other
papers, and contacts to Hitler's airforce
adjutant Nicolaus von Below, and other
high ranking officers. From the collection then
held by the Führungsakademie der Bundeswehr
and private sources I had collected a number of
air force diaries, including those of General
Karl Koller, General Hoffmann von Waldau (I
had to transcribe his very faded and difficult
handwriting) and Field Marshal Wolfram von
Richthofen; I also found some WW1 diaries of
Göring in a collection in Carlisle,
Pennsylvania.

In the official captured "Milch Documents",
to which the British air ministry allowed me
privileged access to in the late 1960s, I found
the stenographic records of the Reich Air
Ministry conferences -- tens of thousands of
pages of them. I made a handwritten index as I
went along, to facilitate their use by other
historians. (It is now at the Institut für
Zeitgeschichte).

While
I was writing the Göring biography, a
British auction house became involved in a
controversy over several of his WW2 private
diaries which it was trying to sell; the German
government laid claim to them, and a private
deal was reached out of court, whereby the
French officer who had looted them sold them
instead to the Institut für Zeitgeschichte
in Munich.

Through the kindness of the then director I
was the first to read and transcribe those
diaries. In the United States, meanwhile, I
chanced upon a very full file of correspondence
that had passed between Göring and his
first wife, the beautiful Carin.
Scattered around various archives, I found the
letter that he had exchanged also with his
second wife Emmy Sonnemann.

The reasult was that eventually I was enabled
to piece together a very unusual and realistic
biography of the man, based entirely on primary
sources, as was my wont.

I simultaneously amassed a collection of
about 2,000 original photographs relating to
Göring, his officers and his years;
Macmillan,
the UK publisher, lost or mislaid the entire
collection, and contacted me ten years later to
say they had found these boxes, clearly marked
"Göring photographs", in a filing cupboard.
(It was one of the first grounds for dissent
between author and publisher.)

The assiduous reader will notice various
differences in structure and content between the
different language editions. The German edition,
published by Albrecht Knaus Verlag of the
Bertelsmann group, minimizes the postwar trial:
"You have spent all those chapters depicting the
man as a villain," complained Dr Knaus to
me, having read the proofs, "and then in the
last few chapters you let him rise again and
roar like a lion at Nuremberg." That was
politically not possible in 1980s Germany.

The American/English edition, when complete,
proved to be overlong, and the American
publishers (William Morrow, Inc.) asked me at a
very late stage to cut 2,000 lines out of the
galley-proofs. As I said, it was
overlong. I achieved the cuts by arbitrarily
abridging all the material relating to the
industrial power base and expansion of the
Luftwaffe: it may seem a pity, as it was
essential to the history of the rise of the
German air force, but something had to go.

The book was very favorably reviewed.
I remember with particular pleasure one Sunday
in 1989 when I was writing in Key West (working
by then on Nuremberg,
the Last Battle) and I picked up a copy of
The Miami Herald which happened to review
the biography: "This brilliant, compelling
pageturner of a book," said the reviewer.

I hope that it is still as enjoyable for you
to read as it was for me to write.

THE
book is dedicated to its first American editor,
ThomasB Congdon (left, in 1979).
He and Connie left New York City in 1994
to live in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Recently
(2000) he wrote two or three chatty human
interest pieces for Forbes magazine. In
one,
of Nov. 2000, he describes seeing several
Christmas pantomimes in England. He has also
written several "vignettes"
for a small Nantucket website.

Jacket text
(the "blurb")

text follows

David Irving has been called 'one of
Britain's foremost historians' by The
Times. He is the author of The Trail of
the Fox, The Destruction of Dresden, and
other works of contemporary history.

.

What the
Papers said --

THIS IS
a very personal
biography. Irving proves that Göring was,
and is, an enigma. He survived in Irving's
judgment through cunning, cruelty, a prodigious
amorality and Hitler's loyalty to him. Irving's
research effort is awesome."